The annual IP&TV World Forum held in London last month was a significant departure from previous incarnations of this event, and provided a telling barometer of the direction in which telco TV, as well as over-the-top (OTT) video services, are heading.

 

The scope of the show has extended substantially beyond its previously more narrow focus on closed-network IPTV, to accommodate a much broader range of adjacent business lines and presentation topics.

 

While this expansion has been gradual, with the conference agenda starting in recent years to include dedicated streams for related themes such as OTT video and IP over cable, this year’s change of name (from IPTV World Forum) marks a growing acknowledgement of some key industry developments.

 

Telcos are finally recognizing that they have other things to offer besides IPTV, which for most hasn’t turned out to be the holy grail they’d hoped for. After years of being fixated with carving out a position in the pay-TV market, many telcos (as well as their software and hardware vendors) are assigning less priority to closed-network video delivery.

 

Instead, they are increasingly redirecting attention to other areas of their portfolios such as broadband (access and VASs), in-home media sharing, and multi-device content delivery. With very few of this year’s conference streams dedicated to IPTV, telco speakers at the event addressed a broader range of topics that included multi-screen delivery, connected home, Internet traffic management, and CDN opportunities.

 

The same was true for the big equipment vendors as well as smaller enabling technology specialists. IPTV middleware providers, previously a staple of this event, were conspicuous by their absence, reflecting partly their consolidation (primarily via acquisitions by larger vendors) and, more importantly, the lower priority of middleware on the telco service development agenda.